New anti-spam legislation will be bad news for any business that communicates electronically and won’t achieve its original objective of stopping unsolicited emails, analysts say.
The Canadian radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) last week finalized its Canadian anti-spam legislation (CASL), which is expected to come into force soon.
Law firm McCarthy Tetrault warns the new legislation poses “significant risks and liabilities for entities doing business in Canada.”
The new laws will prohibit business from using email, electronic newsletters, SMS and even social networks for any commercial purpose without permission from recipients.
“The fines are pretty significant under the legislation,” said Jordanna Cytrynbaum, a partner at McCarthy Tetrault’s Vancouver office.
A fundamental change is that it’s no longer enough for companies to provide recipients with an opt-out provision for unwanted email and newsletters. Recipients must now opt-in to receive any communication that has a commercial purpose, and a customer can’t continue to be contacted even though he or she might have agreed to receive a newsletter or email in the past.
Cytrynbaum said businesses can currently communicate with customers in various ways under “implied consent.”
But under the new legislation, she said, “it’s much more restrictive in terms of when consent can be implied. You can’t just assume that [consent] because somebody is already on your list. It’s opt in, instead of opt out.”
If anyone should be worried about the new legislation, it’s George Moen, who recently stepped down as president of Blenz The Canadian Coffee Co. Ltd. to found Real Time Networks, a business that’s almost entirely dependent on electronic communication, including email, social media and direct calling.
The company’s business model is based on paying affiliates for referrals. But Moen isn’t too worried about CASL. He said he already uses the opt-in requirements that will soon become law and thinks CASL is largely unenforceable, because so much of the unwanted communication Canadians receive comes from outside of Canada.
While the CASL legislation has been massaged to relax some of the administrative burden for business, telecommunications analyst Mark Goldberg said it is “still a bad piece of legislation.”
As Goldberg points out in his Telecom Trends blog, “This bill, as it was passed, will serve to dramatically increase the cost of electronic business and act as a deterrent for e-commerce adoption by legitimate businesses in Canada.” •
